I Got Microsoft Office 2007 Beta2 Running

OH yes I did get Microsoft Office 2007 Beta2 running on my 6 year old PC with a meagre 64 MB RAM. And the best part is that I find it running more efficiently and faster than Office 2003, that’s really commendable to Microsoft for not making Office 2007 a bloat ware. But still the apps are a bit slow in some places and I think that’s acceptable on a PC with 1/4th the RAM than required.

The new User Interface (UI) in Office 2007 is really cool, makes life very easy. But unfortunately Microsoft hasn’t added the new UI to all the applications. Its just available in Excel, PowerPoint, Word & composing part of Outlook. OneNote is the place where this UI is sorely missed. Microsoft says it will add this new UI in the next office release, which essentially means Office13 and that means at least 4 years.

I wont be reviewing Office 2007 Beta2 as I don’t have the time or the resources to do so, and also there are many really good reviews out there on the web. But I will make a comment none the less. Working in apps with the new UI is now so much more easier especially finding new (or maybe old ones which I didn’t know), and this makes life really easy. Its one version that makes you a master even if you have very basic knowledge about computers. Microsoft this time has got the UI bang on target this time around. Another really cool thing is the new font Calibri. It is the default font in Vista, but not available freely for everyone to use. I really wish Microsoft makes it available as a public download, as the only way to get it currently is download any of the Office 2007 Beta packs, which is at least 200 MB. One thing that sucks big time is the black theme, or at least in XP.

One feature that is really going to do wonders for bloggers is direct publishing to the blog from Word itself. In the new document there even is an option “New Blog Post”. The publishing feature is still very buggy and it publishes the blog posts with a date that has its year as 1970, and no categories.

The one big problem is going to be backward compatibility as the file extensions have changed and older versions will not recognize it, unless you specifically save it in Office 2003 format.

I am sticking to Office 2007 Beta2 and am going get the final version, by hook or by crook when its out sometime next year, and is seriously recommended. Even the beta will is much better and stable than Office 2003. So go get your copy and its not a limited 6 month evaluation copy. So Enjoy!!!

Well the guys at google are clever. If they were to make their own office suite & stuff it would take them ateast a decade to reach where Office 2007 is. So creating a web based spreadsheet for everyon to work and share makes sense and supports all Open Source projects in a big way,

The only grief I have with Microsoft is that its getting too greedy. A combined pack of Vista Ultimate & Office Ultimate will cost $1000 when we in India at the most spend $500~$600 on a PC. Then it expects up to “Not Pirate” its software.